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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29684088">Moonshift Genesis: Symbolica's fall</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tabata/pseuds/Tabata'>Tabata</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Leoverse [312]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Glee</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>M/M</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-02-24</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-02-24</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-16 01:26:42</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>3,449</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29684088</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tabata/pseuds/Tabata</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Leo ordered two rare figures of his currently favorite show, but only one has arrived. The other is lost somewhere between Italy and the United States. In his quest to recover it, he will face many dangers, like the dreadful Italian postal service.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Blaine Anderson/Original Male Character(s)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Leoverse [312]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/30541</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Moonshift Genesis: Symbolica's fall</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p><b>WARNING:</b> This story is a <b>spin-off sequel</b> for Broken Heart Syndrome. This means that, despite not being properly set after BHS (but that's only because BHS is probably never going to have a proper ending and we'll keep talking about these people forever), it depicts things happening way late in the 'verse, and that may be on varying degrees of spoiler.</p>
<p>Written for: Lande di Fandom's COW-T #11 (Week 3 - M3)<br/>prompt: Something that is divided at the beginning of the story and it's united at the end</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Blaine is not a man prone to panic, but in the course of several difficult years he has faced too many upsetting and possibly dangerous situations not to get at least a tiny bit concerned whenever he starts hearing mildly distressed screaming around the house, especially if they come from his much younger, much more emotionally unstable husband.</p>
<p>Given that Blaine has spent the entirety of Leo's life minus fifteen years taking care of him emotionally, physically and finally mentally with mixed results, he made it his purpose in life to learn every nuance of Leo's distress and every subtle change in his behavior in order to respond to them the moment they manifest, preventing small snowballs from becoming avalanches.</p>
<p>So, the moment he hears, “This can't be happening!”, coming from somewhere in the house, he runs out of the kitchen – where he was having his morning coffee and reading his mail – pricking his ears up.</p>
<p>Timmy was born when Leo was eighteen and he was – only partially and totally involuntarily – one of the reasons behind the events that led to Leo being the ticking bomb that he is now, and since he came along for half the ride, he became Blaine's unwilling partner in saving this family from devastating volcanic eruptions.</p>
<p>Growing up he has learned a trick or two.</p>
<p>Firstly, to read Blaine's facial expression and quickly establish how serious the situation is. Secondly, whenever he's privy to this information, to communicate Leo's whereabouts to his father in as few words as possible, confining any further information to the second half of the sentence, which his father will most surely hear while he is already running to the rescue.</p>
<p>“Upstairs. His office,” Timmy informs him from the couch. “He got a package in the mail this morning. I think he ran upstairs to open it. He looked overexcited, more than usual I mean.”</p>
<p>Blaine doesn't really <i>run</i>, because he is a reasonable man who, while being always careful of his husband's needs, doesn't automatically think that everything that is happening requires him to rush to Leo's side. But he does climb a few steps just in case, calling for Leo. “Is everything alright, kid?”</p>
<p>“No, Blaine, absolutely nothing is!”</p>
<p>That is enough to dash. Blaine is a reasonable man, but he's also a scarred man who one day came into Leo's late bedroom and found him cutting his own hair with a pair of kitchen scissors. So, most of the time he tries to be sensible, but he drew the line of what he considers <i>non-worrying behavior</i> to Leo screaming that nothing is alright.</p>
<p>And then he gets to Leo's office – the aforementioned room that has been turned into something in between a man cave with less sports paraphernalia and a smart working space – and finds him staring at an open cardboard box, content unknown.</p>
<p>Blaine takes a few tentative steps towards him. He can read any room, but in particularly those that contain his husband, and he knows that the actual situation – whatever is happening – doesn't require immediate cuddling, so he will keep himself away for the moment. He doesn't exclude that a hug will be needed later on, though.</p>
<p>“Baby,” he says softly as he would with a feral beast trapped against his will inside a house it entered unaware that it wasn't, in fact, empty. “What happened?”</p>
<p>Leo has worked on himself a lot in the past years – thanks to a wonderful therapist named Dr. Williams, who helped him out of depression and self-destructive behavior through sweet but firm guidance and a ton of chocolate chip cookies – and one of the greatest lessons he learned very early on is that keeping everything inside doesn't do him any good, that when something upsets him, he has to speak up. No matter how silly something seems to be, communication is key.</p>
<p>And so he always speaks – in fact, he rarely shuts up at this point – and sometimes what he says has little to no meaning to Blaine. Like, for example, now.</p>
<p>“A couple of months ago I bought the last two battle armors of Moonshift Genesis that I was missing,” he explains, still staring at the interior of the cardboard box as if he was mesmerized. “I only needed those two to complete the Aurora Terminal collection. I told you, remember?”</p>
<p>Blaine does not remember.</p>
<p>In fact, he doesn't have the vaguest idea of what his husband is talking about. But, since Blaine happens not to have a clue of what is being said to him only when Leo talks about comics, anime and TV series, this must be what is being discussed here. “Are we talking about... uh, figures, my love?” He asks, tentatively. There's a twenty percent chance he could be right. The other options, he has learned so far, are: model kits, accessories replicas, action dolls and Nendoroids.</p>
<p>He's not totally ignorant of these things. He had a few when he was a teen – he was not really born in the 1950s as everybody likes to think just because he's always been elegant and just a tiny bit old-fashioned – he just wasn't aware of the hundreds of subtle differences. He just thought they were all little statues in different sizes. But Leo is very specific about them – leave it to him to be fussy over the silliest things – and he gets all annoyed when you call one thing with the wrong name.</p>
<p>“Yes, Blaine, we're talking about figures,” Leo confirms, sighing. “I ordered both the Symbolica Station and the Prophecy Station, and only the Prophecy has arrived.”</p>
<p>Blaine feels safe to come closer now. He knows better than picking up the box with the toy inside – sometimes it is allowed, sometimes it absolutely can't be done, but he doesn't understand when, so he decided a long time ago never to touch anything unless specifically instructed – but he looks in the cardboard box to make sure of what's going on.</p>
<p>The Prophecy station appears to be the figure of a purple and silver robot, approximately 9” tall,  holding what looks like a space arrow. It has a very neat, futuristic design, as it often happens, and it is extremely well done, which means Leo must have spent on it a small fortune and it's best for everyone if Blaine doesn't investigate on it.</p>
<p>Anyway, the incredible precision of the details finally jogs Blaine's memory and he remembers, with a little agony if he must be honest, that this is an anime Leo has been raving about for months, so much so that Blaine even remembers the uselessly convoluted plot because Leo has explained it to him in details in the course of several nights before sleep, like an unrequited bedtime story.</p>
<p>Moonshift Genesis is the name of a legendary weapon – some sort of mechanical sword, if Blaine remembers correctly – that dates back to when humanity left a dying Earth to make a life on a new planet called Terra II. The Genesis was used to fight and win a war against a race of hostile aliens and then it got mysteriously lost. Now, a couple of centuries later, some great-great-grandchildren of those pilgrims are fighting against the great-great-grandchildren of those same aliens and they have to find the Genesis before their enemies do. The main characters are part of a team called the Aurora Terminal and they fight in these battle armors, that are in fact almost semi-sentient giant robots, all with preposterous names and even more ridiculous specific abilities.</p>
<p>Leo has already eight of this figures, bought one after the other in a frenzy, but he's been looking for some of them – two, apparently – for quite a while as they were extremely rare. Blaine has no idea why.</p>
<p>“Did you pay for the two and they send you one?” Blaine asks, just to understand if they're dealing with a scam or something else. He's already mentally calling their lawyer.</p>
<p>“No, they sent them both, but with two different shipments, God knows why,” Leo explains, browsing through his e-mails. “Now one is here and the other is lost somewhere in Europe, I guess.”</p>
<p>“Do you have a tracking number?”</p>
<p>“I have several,” Leo sighs, coming down from the mix of outrage, panic and anger that was sending him in overdrive. “But it's not very clear which one is the right one or where the package is exactly because it must be in transit from one place to another.”</p>
<p>“Did it cost a lot, by any chance?” Blaine can't stop himself, he needs to know.</p>
<p>Leo shrugs. “It's not about the money,” he says. “The Symbolica and the Prophecy are very rare figures. There are only a couple thousands of it in the world because they are limited editions. I couldn't buy them when they came out because we were in Russia that week, remember the restaurant in Saint Petersburg? That was the day. I didn't care much because we were having a nice little vacation and everything, I didn't want to, like, ruin everything. Besides I was sure someone was going to buy them and then resell them because that is what they always do. In fact, I found them online, like, three weeks later, and bought them off this guy in Italy. But something went wrong with the shipment, obviously.”</p>
<p>“Are you sure the guy actually sent it to you?”</p>
<p>“Yes! This is not a scam, Blaine. This is the universal inability of any shipping company world-wide to do the only thing they are supposed to do, which is delivering things!”</p>
<p>Alright, it seems like an extremely annoying situation but definitely not a catastrophic one. Other things have been shipped and then got lost in the history of this family – including very precious things – some of them have been retrieved, some of them have remained lost, but they have always taken the problem in stride. The most important thing is that this right here is something they can approach rationally, therefore Blaine is not afraid of it and he knows exactly how to send Leo on the right path to solve the problem.</p>
<p>“What do you want do?”</p>
<p> “Oh, I'm going to track this shit down,” Leo says, sitting down on his gaming chair as one of the main character of his anime inside one of those battle station robot-things. “I'm going to write to and call every single shipping company involved until someone tells me where the fuck my Symbolica Station is.”</p>
<p>It is all it takes, really, to trigger Leo's ability of problem-solving. He's got one, he just never activates it unless you push the right buttons or say the right thing. Now Blaine knows that, one way or the other, this practical problem will be solved without him having to step in. “Good. I'll leave you to it, then,” he says, walking towards the door. “I was having coffee, do you want some?”</p>
<p>Leo grunts something that could be a yes, but that's all he can manage while he plunges himself into the impossible world of tracking numbers and shipments changing hands every two days.</p>
<p>The wandering package containing the coveted Symbolica Station departed from a tiny town in central Italy called Todi on April 20th at 11:45am and traveled safely to the sorting office in Milan, where it arrived on April 24th at 09:00am after being stalled somewhere in between for the weekend.</p>
<p>After that, the information in Leo's possession get fuzzy. He has been given two different tracking numbers. One that seems to belong to the Italian shipping company and another that seems to belong to a German or Austrian one, none of which amounts to any useful information when he inserts them in the tracking pages of those companies.</p>
<p>Leo starts by writing to the Italian shipping company. He keeps the email brief and simple to make sure they will understand him, but the answer he receives two days later makes no sense whatsoever. They give him back the same tracking number and tell him how to use it to track his pack, which is something he already knew. </p>
<p>Deeming this a mere problem of language barrier, he calls the only Italy-related person he knows, who also happens to be his favorite person after Blaine, Cody Petersen. Cody was born and raised in Lima, Ohio, but his mother is Italian and he's living in Italy now, in a huge farm in the heart of Tuscany, so he's pretty much the perfect candidate to help Leo out.</p>
<p>Also, any reason is a good reason to call him.</p>
<p>Cody listens closely to Leo explaining the problem and then he takes it upon himself to understand what's happened to the missing package. Then, while on live chat with the United States, he proceeds to call the shipping company. Leo and Blaine have the privilege to assist to this phone call of which they don't get a single word except for Leo's  very long name, and they both marvel at the fact that people speaking Italian gesticulate also when they can't see each other.</p>
<p>Every gesture seems of rage, but they know for a fact that it is not necessarily so. They try to understand if things are going well by Cody's expressions, then, but that doesn't help them either because Cody frowns and then chuckles and then looks pensive randomly and without any seeming logic. </p>
<p>At least twenty minutes of this foreign circus later, Cody hangs up and explains. “They said they had the package, but it left Milan yesterday. A private shipping company is going to take it to Germany where the delivery will be taken over by UPS. Now, the second tracking number you have is of the German postal service, which has been pre-alerted. You should be able to see more information in a couple of days.”</p>
<p>Leo would marry him over the phone. Blaine has to keep him from popping the question by saying goodbye to Cody and cutting the videochat short. Leo seems temporarily pacified.</p>
<p>Two days later, new information on the shipment pops up on the page and everything seems fine, except that the moment the package departs from Obertshausen, it disappears again. UPS is supposed to have it, but three days after no information on the package can be found on their page. Now, Germany is hostile territory as he doesn't know anybody that speaks fluent German.</p>
<p>The best he can do is calling Annie, who took a German Summer course when they were in high school. Adam is totally against that. He says she's training to go to Mars and she can't be disturbed for something like that. Leo has to literally wrestle her number from Adam's hands. And fueled by the sacred fire of wanting his stuff back, he does. Normally he couldn't win a fight against Adam, who's stronger and in far better shape, but he plays dirty.</p>
<p>All is fair in love, war and, apparently package retrieving.</p>
<p>As they roll on the floor, grunting and panting over each other and Adam wonders what the fuck is going on, Leo just gives him a quick kiss on his lips. The kiss serves two purposes. One, Adam just stops moving, stunned. Two, Leo needs to scratch an itch and that quite does the trick.</p>
<p>Disheveled and out of breath, Leo calls Annie on the way home. It turns out that all she remembers of German is how to ask for the bathroom, which might be very useful while you travel but not when you have to ask where your package is. Luckily for him, while he was fighting Adam for Annie's number, the UPS page has been updated.</p>
<p>The package is safely traveling towards the United States.</p>
<p>At that point Blaine dares to sigh with relief. The only thing left to do is wait, he thinks. After almost two weeks of shipping agony, they can finally relax and let the good men and women of UPS do their job.</p>
<p>Of course not.</p>
<p>Leo is so not good at waiting that he never really does. He's not a big fan of the concept of <i>being patient</i> and even less of downtime. Every time he has to wait to do something – either because there's a queue or because that specific thing must be done in a specific day – he needs to find something else to kill time. He usually fidgets with something: a book, a portable video game, his phone. But facing the great unknown of his package's whereabouts while it makes its journey through Europe, he needs something more.</p>
<p>He starts picking up hobbies – new ones and old ones that he had abandoned – all things that he does for a couple of hours before getting distracted with the next one. He's not really interested in doing something, but his brain is a dark pit of confusion and madness and it is telling him that the only way to survive this is overload.</p>
<p>Spoiler alert: it is not, but his brain is not exactly trustworthy.</p>
<p>He downloads an app to learn Italian – you never know when you will need it to speak with another shipping company again <i>and</i> it is Cody's second language, so bonus points – then he starts painting figures again, he buys all the equipment to build miniature houses with miniatures bricks, he asks his daughter for piano lessons. Then he goes back to  one of his greatest loves, cooking, and he decides that the time has come to learn how to do meringues, which have been eluding him since the dawn of his cooking experience when he was about six. Blaine, who's used to all this by now, doesn't even lift a finger. He lets everything pile up around him – paints, figures, bricks, meringues – waiting for the moment when Leo will calm down.</p>
<p>The house is the site of a nuclear fallout, but there is no coming out of this while they're still in the middle of it, he knows that now, so he either exercises patience or he gets a divorce, and he's not there yet.</p>
<p>The situation plunges into total disaster when on May 9th, about three weeks after it all begun, Leo receives a message from UPS stating that <i>the package has been successfully delivered</i>, but it has not.</p>
<p>And they would know, Leo has been religiously waiting for the mail every single day since an e-mail informed him that his Symbolica Station had finally arrived in the country. </p>
<p>At that point, the explosion cannot be contained any longer. “How is this even possible?” Leo screams, furious. “They had my address and it was correct. I checked four times, Blaine, four times! How hard can it be to read the name of a street on a piece of paper and bring something to that specific street? Where the fuck is my package?”</p>
<p>“We can call UPS, see if they can help.”</p>
<p>“I've been calling for the past twenty minutes and I still have to talk with a human being!”</p>
<p>Leo starts to scream insults at an entirely automatic system that can't understand a single command and keeps repeating that he should press number 2, 3, 4 or 5. Luckily the doorbell rings,  relieving Blaine from the burden of having to knock his husband out.</p>
<p>“Yes?”</p>
<p>On their doorsteps, their lovely elderly neighbor is holding a box. “Hello, the postman left this at my door by mistake. I think it's yours.”</p>
<p>“Oh my God, you are saving my life,” Blaine sighs with relief. “My husband has been trying to get hold of this box for days. Leo, come—“</p>
<p>Leo is there before Blaine can even finish the sentence, possibly summoned by the subtle vibration of the package, calling him to itself. “Thanks,” he says before grabbing the box and disappearing upstairs.</p>
<p>Blaine smiles nervously at their neighbor. “Coffee?”</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>*</p>
</div>Two hours later the air in the house has changed. All is well and calm again and even Timmy can go back to sit on the couch without fear of his father coming and asking him to teach him basket or volleyball.<p>Blaine ventures upstairs, bringing two mugs of hot cocoa just for good measure, and he finds Leo sitting at his desk and miraculously working. Above his head, on a shelf he bought and hung just for them, are all the figures of the Aurora Terminal collection, including the Symbolica and the Prophecy Station, finally reunited.</p>
<p>“Everything okay, kid?” He asks.</p>
<p>Leo pushes himself away from the desk and rotates on his chair to look at him with a smile. He welcomes his presence with a kiss and the hot cocoa with a moan. “Absolutely everything is.”</p>
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